The Gun-Control Debate Won’t Be Won With Statistics

When horrific shootings happen, we trot out sobering facts. It’s not working.

Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images and Thinkstock.

I first learned of the shooting in Roseburg, Oregon, last week by logging into Facebook. But my friends weren’t linking to articles about the massacre itself. Rather, many of them were sharing statisticsand charts about U.S. gun violence assembled by various news sites and organizations, Slate included. Must be another shooting, I thought, and soon read the reports of the nine dead at Umpqua Community College at the hands of Chris Harper-Mercer. It was a sadly familiar ritual: The majority of my friends are in favor of gun control, and they post their links. The statistics, as always, show that gun deaths in the United States are wildly disproportionate compared with every other country in the world, that fewer guns correlate with fewer gun deaths, and that guns are absurdly easy to obtain in this country. A few pro-gun people I know argue against the majority of my friends, who then argue back, and no one ever changes his mind. Lather, rinse, repeat.

As much as many of us know we are right about mass shootings and are sure we can win the argument by looking to statistics—often packaged in a viral infographic—the debate over gun control in the United States is based far more on first principles than on evidence. The stats we glom onto and share to our Facebook feeds aren’t wrong, but they also don’t make a difference to the broader debate. Rather than chill a heated standoff with cold facts, they primarily serve to reinforce our gut instincts. They tell us the facts are on our side, but not how to solve the problem. If changing the status quo is truly what we want, we’ll need a radically different strategy.

Yet gun-control people aren’t necessarily entitled to the scientific high ground, because they themselves—weourselves—are guilty of selective outrage. If we really care about the numbers, there are other messages for us in them that we aren’t hearing, obfuscated by the focus on these high-profile shooting deaths. Notably, gun violence has decreased an awful lot in the United States. According to a Pew report, firearm homicide is down 50 percent from its 1993 peak, an impressive drop for which no conclusive explanation exists. The current firearm homicide rate is lower than any time since the 1960s. In that time, the percentage of mass shootings as a percentage of total gun deaths has gone up, but these atrocities still make up less than 1 percent of total gun deaths. The reason we talk as much about them, and about gun violence in general, isn’t because we’ve taken a hard look at the numbers. It’s because we have principles, and because as humans we imbue these shootings with great symbolic import.

If we truly took the statistical view, gun killings wouldn’t stand out as the most egregious cause of death, even in the United States. For 2013, the CDC lists 16,000 homicides in the U.S., 11,000 of which were by firearm—predominantly pistols. Auto accidents still kill three times as many people as gun homicides do (34,000 in 2013) despite vehicular deaths consistently falling since 1980. But at least that rate is also going down. Gun suicides occurred at nearly twice the rate of homicides—21,000—and that number is not dropping. The real shocker, however, is in drug poisoning. The CDC reports 39,000 accidental drug poisoning deaths in 2013, twice as many as there were in the year 2000, more or less picking up the slack from the decline in homicides. Two of the primary culprits are opioid painkillers like oxycodone (37 percent of drug poisoning deaths) and benzodiazepines like Xanax (10 percent), whose death rates have soared: Since 2000, opioid death rates are up 400 percent, while benzodiazepine deaths are up 1,000 percent. Statistically, drug-poisoning deaths are the exploding epidemic that mass shootings are not, yet most weeks you’d be hard-pressed to read anything about this or about what’s being done about it. When you share a gun violence infographic, you may be right about guns, as I believe I am, but that’s different from being objective.

From a purely statistical point of view, mass shootings are unrepresentative and anecdotal, yet they receive a disproportionate amount of our attention and outrage, nudging us to connect these anomalous horrors to grand unified theories of everything from racism to religion. There are various justifications that can be made for this. Some incidents may strike us, for whatever reason, as especially pointless, a worse crime than an “ordinary” homicide. They may simply make for better clickbait and reshares. Or we may viscerally feel they demand a response from us, individually and collectively. Those are all reasonable explanations. None is empirical.

I cannot tell you to worry more about one cause of death over another, any more than I can say that one sort of death is more or less awful than another. What I can say, however, is that the cycle of reaction to these awful events is not a healthy phenomenon. By letting reactive news cycles set the agenda, even thoughtful people lock into tunnel vision. Being bombarded by groupthink on an issue, with stats backing it up, only seems to make the opposite side seem less reasonable, more immoral, and less human. That may help you feel like you’re on the right side of history, but it does nothing to bridge the philosophical gulfs over truly schismatic issues like gun control. We shouldn’t abandon our instinctive responses of horror to even rare occurrences like mass shootings, but we also need to realize they are at best dubious guides to practical action. The selective usage of statistics coats our partiality in the cloak of scientific objectivity, validating our instincts and making people lesswilling to see our side. If Americans are ever going to reach a consensus on gun control, it will happen because our principles have evolved, not because the numbers led us there. I favor a country with fewer guns because I think the ensuing reduction in gun deaths would outweigh any accompanying loss of liberty, recreation, or psychological benefit. But I know I will only convince others by altering their beliefs about liberty, recreation, and psychological benefit—not by throwing numbers at them. Statistics don’t change people’s minds—people do.